More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere also makes the oceans more acidic — and that's bad news for many marine creatures that rely on calcium carbonate shells to survive. But it's not that simple, scientists are discovering: Not all shell-building creatures respond the same way to acidifying seawater.

A magnitude-6.0 earthquake struck eastern Turkey Monday morning, causing severe damage and killing more than 50 people.

A growing number of industries turning their eyes to the vast real estate in the U.S.' deep offshore waters — a region that may soon become a busy, crowded place. But balancing commercial and environmental interests in those waters may require regulatory oversight that does not yet exist.

When natural disasters strike major cities, such as the Haiti earthquake and 2005's Hurricane Katrina, scientists debate whether to rebuild or relocate the city. Relocating may be the best bet for Port-au-Prince, says EARTH commenter and Columbia Earth Institute geophysicist John Mutter. But in other cases, such as New Orleans, we should rebuild.

In 1983, the erstwhile surface mine Gateway Hill, part of Canada's Athabasca Oil Sands Deposit, resembled a pockmarked, barren moonscape. Today, after years of reclamation effort, Gateway Hill is thickly forested and filled with wildlife — and as the first oil sands mine site to be certified by the government to be at pre-mine condition, it is a model for new and ongoing reclamation projects.

As the climate changes, warmer conditions are creeping northward — and termites, among other creatures, are likely to expand their territories into higher latitudes. Those areas, however, are currently ill-equipped to handle termites, which could cause billions of dollars in property damages.

Washington, D.C., has been buried in snow over the last week, prompting many people to ask what that means about global warming. The answer? Nothing: It’s weather, not climate.

Unlike other natural disasters, snowstorms have no categorization system. But NOAA now has a snowstorm ranking system that includes snowfall inches, societal impact and population density — to show where the storm hit hardest.

Inexpensive, abundant and relatively clean: EARTH commenter and Stanford geophysicist Mark Zoback makes the case for natural gas to become a key part of U.S. energy policy.

Buried beneath Alaska’s North Slope are an estimated 17 trillion cubic meters of frozen methane, or natural gas. Getting the gas out of the reservoirs poses technical problems and serious risks — but a new approach that proposes to pump carbon dioxide in to replace the methane could help to solve two looming problems.

Scientists familiar with the geology of Hispaniola, the island that includes Haiti and Dominican Republic, have warned for years the region was overdue for a major quake. And, they say, it's likely that the quakes are not over.

The people of Xuan Wei, China, suffer the world's highest incidence of lung cancer among non-smokers. Burning coal from the Permian-Triassic boundary may be to blame.

The largest measured earthquake ever to strike Haiti rocked the heavily populated island nation Tuesday.

The planet CoRoT-7b, discovered orbiting a distant star in February 2009, is five times as large as Earth but sizzling hot — so hot its atmosphere vaporizes rocks.

A new discovery of fossilized footprints of tetrapods — the earliest known vertebrates with four limbs instead of fins — is changing what scientists thought about the timing of the transition from swimming to walking vertebrates.